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Wednesday, 20 May 2015

The Trouble with Time Travel

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So the first season of The Flash just had it’s finale, and
yes it was awesome. The whole series was awesome, satisfying our need for comic
book silliness, but tackling it in a cool, modern way. But it will inevitably
suffer from the same problem that anything attempting time travel will. There’s
a huge paradox that cannot be escaped.

Unless you’re approaching it from a “history cannot be
changed, everything will still play out the same angle”. Those will work.
Anything that attempts to change the past to alter the present will fall into
the gaping hole of “but what happens now?”.

Let me just stop here to post a spoiler warning ahead for
the finales of both The Flash AND Arrow, so if you aren’t caught up, beware!

SPOILER
ALERT!!!!

So Wells/Thawne goes nuts about not being able to get home,
and vows to kill Barry and everyone around him. What a nut job. Cue he and
Barry blurring around landing blows where they can. Barry’s about to lose, and
enter Eddie. He shoots himself, and as one of Wells/Thawne’s ancestors, Thawne
then fades out of existence, his whole line wiped out. Aside from the
horrifying realisation that Eddie just killed god knows how many more people
just to take out Thawne (yes I know that Eddie is also a Thawne but for the
sake of clarity let’s go with it). I mean seriously, how many “greats” came
before “grandfather”? All gone, along with any other relatives of Thawne. Nice
job Eddie!

Anyway, back to the time travel thing. If Eddie shot
himself, and Thawne was never born, we have the obvious issue of Barry not
being the Flash. You could argue that Wells was eventually going to do the
experiment anyway, and Thawne just needed it to happen sooner, sure, that’s
fair enough. But now, without Thawne, The Flash isn’t around until Wells (the
real one) gets around to doing it himself, which causes loads of problems.

And before you go saying “but without the explosion, there’s
no meta humans to stop, so it’s all good!”, think about the other,
non-particle-accelerator related issues that being the Flash has helped with.
Eg that fire a few weeks ago? Did all those people just die?

Next up, let’s talk about the implications this has on
Arrow. For starters, Ollie is dead. So is Roy. Remember that time that they
were gonna be skewered on Boomerang’s…um…boomerangs? They were conveniently
saved by a super speed rescue by the Scarlet Speedster…except, he’s not around
yet. Wells is taking longer to build the accelerator. Which means that Ra’s Al
Ghul is still alive and kicking, Starling City has been destroyed by the
Alpha/Omega virus, Team Arrow is still trapped in Nanda Parbat (Barry didn’t
come to save them, remember?) and everything’s going to hell.

We were shocked too guys.

But even looking past that, if you came up with some wibbly
wobbly, timey wimey explanation (Doctor Who reference anyone? Geddit?), there’s
still a MASSIVE flaw in any time travel story (excluding the aforementioned
ones about how nothing can change). Many films and TV shows fall victim to this
hole (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban springs to mind, and don’t get
me started on Looper). If something happens to erase the bad things that have
happened, the events leading up to the thing that happened never would have
happened, meaning that the thing that would have happened was never stopped.

Confused? Me too. Let’s use the Flash to put it in context.
Eddie removes Thawne from the timeline, meaning he never could have come back,
caused all the issues that led up to the moment when Eddie shot himself. Eddie
shot himself because Thawne was about to kill Barry, but if Thawne never
existed, he could never have been there to try to kill Barry, therefore Eddie
never shot himself, therefore Thawne did exist, come back and try to kill
Barry.

The point comes down to this – time travel might be cool,
but there’s a damn big hole to fall into. Nine times out of ten, the events of
a time travel adventure will lead to a paradox that the writers will gloss
over, and distract us with some fancy sci-fi visuals, and as much as I love the
Flash and think it’s a great show, I have to say J’accuse!